Tuesday, 23 October 2012

Long before I was
old enough to know what it was all about, I loved listening to Alistair Cooke's
Letter from America.
Cooke's opening gambit would always be something like "I was standing on
the corner of Lexington Avenue on a Sunday in May waiting for a bus …" and
off he would go at a pace that seemed far too leisurely for a mere 14-minute
programme, only for him to sidle seamlessly into his main theme just in time. Mostly,
it was his voice that kept you listening: beautifully modulated, slightly
breathy from chain smoking, with a gentle ascension and declension ideally
tailored to his script's skilful melding of the written and spoken word. It is
impossible to read Cooke's prose now without hearing that voice in your head.

On 1 November, as
part of its 90th birthday celebrations, the BBC is releasing 920 editions of
Letter from America
on the Radio 4 website. It is a fitting choice with which to initiate an
intended expansion of the BBC's online radio archive because what made Letter
from America
so compelling was really the essence of radio itself – its capacity to draw us
in and make us listen intently to the sound of another human voice.

Before radio came
along, the ability to hear the voices of absent speakers was seen as the
preserve of spiritual mediums or mad people. Early listeners were fascinated by
this strange phenomenon, the radio wave, which could carry voices on the air
but was itself undetectable without that magical deciphering machine, a
wireless. One of the radio wave's great charms was that, unlike the telephone
or the telegraph, it radiated to no one in particular. The early term for the BBC's
audience, "listeners in", suggested they were eavesdropping on a voice
that was not really speaking to them but to the universe. "By enabling a
whole country or continent to listen to a disembodied voice, wireless
concentrates attention on it – flood-lights it, as it were – bringing out every
little trick and peculiarity," wrote the BBC's first director of talks,
Hilda Matheson, in 1933. "The violence of emotion produced in quite mild
people by unfamiliar pronunciation, vowels, accent, is an astonishing proof of
this heightened consciousness."

When listeners get
used to a radio voice, though, they become tenaciously attached to it. News of
the imminent retirement of the Radio 4 announcers, Harriet Cass and Charlotte
Green, has led to a wave of melancholy among the station's audience because,
just by reading the Shipping Forecast and introducing You and Yours in pleasing
inflections over thousands of days, their voices have wheedled their way into listeners'
heads. My own favourite radio voices are John Murray, the Northumbrian-accented
5 Live commentator who always sounds as though he is in a musical and is about
to break into song; and Clare Runacres, who reads the news on Radio 2 in such
an emollient voice that, should the need sadly arise, I would like it to tell
me to form an orderly queue for the lifeboats.

The voices coming
through the radio mean a lot to us because they wrap themselves around our
daily routines. Over 58 years, entering people's homes at more or less the same
time every week, Cooke's voice came to seem as eternal as the news pips. That
is why, although we should all cheer the expansion of the BBC's digital archive,
I hope that one of its rationales for expanding it – that real-time radio and
the daily schedule are on the way out and that the listeners of the near future
will all be selecting programmes themselves online like picking items off a
menu – turns out to be wrong. The Letter from America
archive will be a great resource, but it won't be quite the same as that familiar
Friday evening ritual, with that slight pause after the announcer's
introduction and that inimitable voice saying: "Our plane was coming in
from San Francisco,
nosing in through endless layers of cotton wool …"

Sunday, 14 October 2012

Helen Nicoll, the author of the Meg and Mog books,
died a fortnight ago. I discovered from her obituary that these books were
largely written in a cafe at Membury Services on the M4, where she and her
illustrator, Jan Pienkowski, would meet because it was roughly equidistant
between their houses in Wiltshire and London.
I think this may be the only example of a literary collaboration forged at a
roadside service station - with the arguable exception of Julio Cortazar and
Carol Dunlop's The Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, an account of their month-long
residence by the side of the Autoroute du Soleil, the road that runs from Paris
to Marseille.

For most of us, motorway service stations are non-places
where we have only brief, anonymous encounters with other human beings. But
people do meet there. They are a well-known no man's land for divorced couples
to exchange children, and for football transfer bungs to be handed over in
brown envelopes. You
can sit in a service station for hours
and, for all the attention you get from the table clearers and floor wipers,
you might as well be a ghost. That’s why low-level lawlessness has
always thrived in the anonymity of the cafes and car parks. Unwanted babies are
dumped here, illegal immigrants exchanged, drugs and contraband traded by
small-time criminals.

In the 1960s,
gigging musicians would bump into each other after midnight at the M1 service stations and exchange
gossip about venues and recording deals. The Beatles, according to one Newport
Pagnell counter-assistant, were ‘very unruly’ and threw bread rolls at their
manager, Brian Epstein. Pink Floyd’s drummer, Nick Mason, once recalled the
Blue Boar at Watford Gap at two o’clock
on a Sunday morning looking like a Ford Transit van rally as bands made
their way back from gigs, and ‘crushed velvet trousers outnumbered truckers’
overalls’. When Jimi Hendrix first
arrived in Britain,
he heard the name ‘Blue Boar’ so often that he thought it was a new nightclub
and asked which band was playing there that night. Chris White of the Zombies
called it ‘the feeding trough of the mid-60’s Beat Boom’.

I'm doing a talk on roads as part of the Liverpool
Biennial on 7 November, and I have to relate them somehow to this year's theme
of 'hospitality'. Of course, most people think of roads as pretty inhospitable
places, but then most of them don't know about the role of Membury Services in
helping to create the Meg and Mog books.

About Me

I am a writer and academic, based at Liverpool John Moores University. I have written five books, the most recent of which are Queuing for Beginners (2007), a cultural history of daily habits since the war, inspired in part by the Mass-Observation surveys of the 1930s and 1940s, and On Roads: A Hidden History (2009). As well as publishing articles in obscure academic journals, I write for the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Financial Times and other publications. I am a cultural historian focusing on the very recent past, with a particular interest in the everyday. To email me, click on 'view my complete profile' below. You can follow me on Twitter at
twitter.com/joemoransblog